Just a few days before Russia launched its special military operation on the territory of Ukraine, the heads of the then-unrecognized Donbass breakaway republics reported publicly that tensions were rising and called for the evacuation of the civilian population. Since the start of the offensive, Russia has reportedly accepted around 200,000 people from the republic, while the UN estimates the total number of people fleeing Ukraine at over 2 million people.

A lot have been accommodated in Rostov Region bordering the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR). Local hotels are used for shelter, and food and supplies keep coming through the humanitarian effort. I got in touch with one of the organizations helping with the refugee program and have been able to interview a number of people in a hotel located on the left bank of the Don River. This is where you can meet women and children who fled from the war that tore up their homes.

Abandoned child’s toy sits unhappily in unnamed courtyard in far-away country of which we know nothing.

Natalya is from Gorlovka, a town not far from the city of Donetsk. Gorlovka, as is well known, was the sight of the most gruesome and devastating battles a few years ago. On the morning of the interview, I was looking through the reports, and they made it clear that both Donetsk and the surrounding areas were again an active war zone that even most war reporters were no longer allowed to enter. As we talk, Natalya keeps drinking coffee, smoking one cigarette after another, and trying to keep in check a sturdy boy of about five years old. Natalya is here with her younger son and a grandson. Her husband, who serves with the DPR People’s Militia, thought it best to send them away to a safer place.

“On February 18, we were shelled at night. A bomb exploded not far from us. Thank God none of us were hurt, but we got really scared, especially the little one. As soon as evacuation was announced we packed and left. It took us no longer than 15 minutes. 

“My husband has been with the militia since May 2014. Last year we were in the thick of things and saw everything with our own eyes. Our son is 14, and he is a very scared boy. He was only 5 when the war started. He learned to respond to air raid alerts before many other things. When we shouted ‘corridor!’ it meant he had to go hide in the corridor that instant, because it had no windows and was the safest place in the house. We used to hide in the corridor all the time. We didn’t have a basement we could use.

“There has been a lot of shelling over the past few years. It almost feels like we were bombed every day. Back in 2014 and 2015, Gorlovka was shelled a lot. Then it became less intense and the mines mostly landed on the outskirts, while the central parts of the town remained safe. But now it’s bad again, and no houses have any windows left in place. There’s some massive shelling going on. We’re really scared for the lives of our loved ones who are still there. I have trouble getting in touch with my husband. He calls me whenever he can, and if I pick up right away, we can talk. If I miss his window of opportunity, I keep waiting till the next time he tries to contact me. I’m scared.

“It was a very scary experience. You learn to recognize the threat by the sound. You can hear the launch, the projectile coming and you count one, two, three, four, five, explosion. “That’s when you have to hide in the corridor. If the projectile takes longer before it explodes it may land further away, but you never know, it may land closer. If it’s making a whistling sound, it’s a 120-mm gun. If it’s making a rustling sound, it’s a 150-mm one. But you can’t really guess where it’s going to hit. After each round, we get 10 to 20 minutes of silence. That’s when we can move.

“You always have to be on your toes listening, you can’t let your guard down even in your sleep. You have to walk carefully. When you hear explosions, you’d better get down immediately and hide; you have to always think where and how you can duck and hide. 

“In 2014, we weren’t ready, so many were killed or injured. And now people try to stay safe and they know how to do it. My neighbor even fought on the frontline in the trenches. She had three concussions and can’t serve anymore for health reasons. 

“When we arrived at the hotel here, there were fireworks. It was beautiful, there was some party not far from here, I guess. My son jumped to the floor from the bed – it’s a habit with him already. My grandson got nervous, ‘Grandma, what is it?’ So we had to take him outside and show it really was the fireworks, not the bombs.

“Airplanes also scared us at first. The last time we had to evacuate here briefly was after air raids. It’s a reflex – you see a plane, even a civilian one, you crouch, get to the ground and look for cover. 

“We always tried to take our children to school and back. Sometimes the shelling wasn’t that intense and children could play outside freely.”

Foreign people climbing steps for exercise.

When asked what people from the DPR and LPR were thinking about the current events, Natalya answered in a heartbeat; she knows where her loyalty lies and why.

“People are happy. They are scared, of course, but happy. That’s progress, finally. For eight years, we’ve been living surrounded by enemies. And now they shell us more, people die, but that’s a start, we’ll punish those… monsters. Yes, monsters, I can’t call them anything else.

“We are mad. We are tired. We are waiting for them to finally get pushed away. The farther the better. Best if they were driven into Poland and got locked up there. We want to be home, more than anything else. It’s fine here, people are helping us, but we have homes. I was born in Gorlovka.

“Before the war, my husband was a coal miner. He worked in a mine until the House of Trade Unions was burned down in Odessa with people in it. It happened on May 2, and on May 5, my husband finished his shift and went off to war. And since then, I haven’t seen him much. He rarely visits us. Now they’re firing Grad missiles at Gorlovka. I’ve seen the explosions with my own eyes, it’s better to stay away from there.

“In 2014, a family was killed in a building next to ours. A shell hit the 8th floor of an apartment building. A husband, a wife, their son who’d just started the first grade at school and their 5-year-old daughter. Four floors collapsed after the shell hit. The building has been repaired, but people are too scared to live there.

“Why is it happening to us? Is it because we refused to speak and teach our children Ukrainian? Is it because we wanted to celebrate Victory Day? Or respect our elderly and history? Why did they have to kill us for that?

“I don’t understand Ukrainian. I was born and raised in Ukraine, but I mostly have Russian roots. My son knows history well – he likes to learn about these things. And he knows for a fact that we are not a part of Ukraine, and we’ve never been. It’s our region with all its resources that has been ‘feeding’ Ukraine, and now they say that we are poor and need to be subsidized.”

Nelly Ivanovna, another Gorlovka resident, has been evacuated to Rostov with her grandson. She still has relatives and friends living in Donetsk and other towns in the DPR. As she is talking to me, Elena, a younger woman from Donetsk, occasionally joins in on the conversation. There are other women, all with young children, who have something to say.

“We have been living under artillery fire ever since 2014. We keep talking to the media about it, but nothing changes. This isn’t normal. We’ve been living in a constant state of fear and anxiety. When they fire at us during the day, at least we know where to run to, but at night it’s a lot easier to give in to panic. You have to go through it yourself to understand – I could talk about these things for hours, but no words can describe what it’s really like out there.”

As the war dragged on, the women of the DPR have mastered ways of keeping themselves safe during shelling. They tell us how to move from shelter to shelter, talk about the range of fragments from shells, etc. This seems to be the first thing that comes to mind when asked about life in their hometowns.

“I used to be good friends with a family from Poltava. They speak Ukrainian. I love the language, I really do – it’s so rich and melodic. You must never use language as a pretext for war! Before, I would call my Ukrainian friends and tell them about our situation, about all the shelling. It seemed like they heard our plight, it seemed like they sympathized. And now that they heard some explosions outside their own city, they started to panic: ‘The Russians are invading our land!’ We have been living like this for eight years, and it’s still like that for us,” Nelly says.

“I called my relatives the other day. They said that on February 3, a shell hit a house on Korolenko Street. That’s the central part of the city. A family, including two young children, was hurt. People are afraid to leave their homes in fear of new attacks. It’s a nightmare.”

Nelly brings up ‘the Madonna of Gorlovka’ – the name Kristina Zhuk came to be known by on social media after she was killed by a Ukrainian shell in July 2014, along with her 10-month-old daughter. When it happened, Kristina was walking in the park with her daughter. A journalist who happened to be there witnessed the woman’s last agonizing moments, providing one of the first pieces of photographic evidence that Ukraine was using weapons indiscriminately against the people of Donbass.

Read the whole thing.

With the military operation taking place in Ukraine, some might ask – how will the locals react? Eight years ago, the general consensus was that the southern and eastern regions were pro-Russian, but then the Kiev regime started to brutally repress activists who wanted closer ties with Moscow. An aggressive war propaganda campaign was launched targeting Russia.

RT spoke about this with Vladislav Dolgoshey, an activist from Odessa who spent four years in jail after being charged with “pro-Russian subversive activities” without any proof. In 2019, he was released as part of a prisoner exchange. After this interview, Vladislav went to the frontline as a volunteer and joined the People’s Militia of the Donetsk People’s Republic.

— What was your path to your pro-Russian political views?

I wouldn’t call my political views pro-Russian, they are just Russian. You have pro-Russian views when your position on certain issues reflects that of Russia as a state. I consider myself Russian – ethnically, spiritually, nationally. Yes, I was born in a different country, foreign to Russia, but that’s just my circumstances.

My views were shaped by my surroundings. Odessa is still the most Russian city in Ukraine. The Russian language is absolutely predominant, and even Ukrainian nationalists complain that when a Ukrainian comes to Odessa, they start speaking Russian. And the residents are very protective of their Odessa identity. That facilitates assimilation.

My upbringing also played its part. My father was a pro-Russian politician, but, to his credit, he never imposed any of his views on me, just recommended reading books. I read books written by Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian historians.

— How did the Russian movement in Odessa react to the Euromaidan events?

The situation wasn’t great for us in 2014. President Yanukovych didn’t like the Russian movement very much, and this was his attitude to both nationalists and Orthodox activists. Despite this, more and more people joined our events every year. And these were very diverse groups – nationalists, Orthodox Christians, leftists, all united by one idea – their Russian identity.

Our reaction to the Euromaidan events was negative from the very beginning. First of all, we knew who was behind it. We understood which side Euromaidan turned to and knew for a fact that the West was not the political community we wanted to belong to.

We began to form militia units in February, but we were too late. Maidan had already happened, it had its hit squads and money. We acted fast, like in that saying about Russians taking their time to prepare for something but then moving fast. But we still were unprepared for what was to come. Russians are kind people. We had no idea something like the tragic events of May 2 could really happen. (Ukrainian nationalists murdered 50 pro-Russian demonstrators in the Trade Unions House during the protests. Vladimir Putin promised to find and punish the perpetrators in his 21st February speech — RT.)

The leaders kept saying that it was a peaceful protest, just people defending their rights and fighting for democracy. But once the West comes, there can be no democracy. All pro-Western revolutions were not about democracy – their goal was to create a corrupt system of colonial control. Democracy is something the West wants only for itself. And the West turned Ukraine into an unstable structure vulnerable to outside influence.

— What’s changed after the May 2 tragedy?

There were some legal political activities allowed by the Kiev regime. They were carried out by old people with Communist and religious views. But Ukrainian radicals had the nerve to attack even these grandmas and grandpas. Many healthy strong men went to the frontline, to the Donbass. Of course, not everybody made it. 100-150 inmates would be incarcerated in the Odessa jail at a time – these people were arrested as they tried to make their way to the Donbass.

There were also underground groups operating in Odessa and the Odessa Region. The indictment against me – and I would like to stress that the charges have never been proven – said that the allegedly sabotage unit under my command perpetrated terrorist attacks and sabotage activities across several regions in the southeast of Ukraine. The underground movement existed for around 18 months, engaged in this invisible struggle. Trust me when I say that 18 months is a really long time for an underground movement with no experience, no bases and no resources.

— Why have there been no tragedies comparable to the Odessa one in other cities across the southeastern part of the country?

You have to understand that Odessa was a stronghold of the pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine. We’ve always been very vocal about it, and even now our people are not happy about the Ukrainian government. There are rumors that the current mayor of Odessa, Gennady Trukhanov, has a Russian passport and actually holds pro-Russian views. I don’t think these rumors are true, even though Trukhanov did make a speech at Kulikovo Pole Square not long before May 2 happened. So, in this period, between the Euromaidan winning and the tragedy, he was on our side. Then he made a U-turn, which is pretty typical of politicians.

Moreover, not many people know that they used force to crush pro-Russian movements in other Ukrainian cities as well. Take Zhitomir. Nothing like May 2 happened there, of course, but Zhitomir is not Odessa – it’s closer to the western part of the country. It was bad in Kharkov, and in Nikolayev they burned a makeshift camp. But it wasn’t on camera and the media didn’t cover it, though it was a real struggle, a street war and there were casualties.

To give you a better idea of what was happening, I can tell you that one Euromaidan supporter who later became part of the Azov Battalion (forbidden in the Russian Federation) claimed that even the war was less scary than Kharkov in 2014. You never knew what direction you could be hit from, you were always on the lookout for a sneak attack. It was the same in Odessa. We had a literal war in the streets, with cars and houses set on fire. People were being killed, some went missing. That was the civil war – it was back then.

— So why did the ideas of the ‘Russian Spring’ fail to triumph in most of the Ukrainian southeast in 2014?

They didn’t fail in 2014. The ‘Russian spring’ ended in 2015, after Minsk II. Until then, even though there were no military hostilities and no frontlines, hundreds and thousands of people were politically active and involved in the underground movement in Odessa and other places. It’s obvious if you look at the sheer number of political prisoners in Ukraine that were later swapped for POWs.